An Independent Woman

by Howard Fast

  “Freddie,” she finally said, “would you expect a white woman to fall into bed with you on the first date?”

  “It happens.”

  “What is a woman, anyway? Have you ever asked yourself that?… Why do you come to me, Freddie?” There was an angry edge to her voice now. “I’m not your confessor and I’m not a psychiatrist. You do a nasty, degrading thing to a woman and she spits in your face. And she’s a black woman. Has it ever occurred to you to think of what it means to be a black woman, or a white woman—or any kind of woman? We’ve known each other since you were a child. I watched you being baptized at Grace Church. Yes, yes, you went down to Mississippi to register black voters, and you were very brave and it broke my heart to see you in the hospital down there, but what did you learn? I spent my whole life trying to be something that any woman has the right to be, and you were always like a son to me and I always loved you, but you treat women like dirt, not like people.”

  “I don’t treat you like dirt.”

  “Freddie, would you say what you just told me to a man? Probably, whoever the man, he’d laugh it off and say something like, ‘Sonny, it comes with the territory.’ At least you have the decency to know that you did something disgusting. That’s not much of a plus, but it’s something. You’re forty-two years old. You almost destroyed May Ling, and you haven’t been able to make it with any woman. Yes, they love you. You’re tall and handsome and you carry the Lavette name. Freddie, get some help, please. That’s all. Now go upstairs and sleep it off. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He had no retort to what she said, but he took himself upstairs like a whipped dog, and when Barbara came downstairs in the morning, Freddie was gone. He’d left a note on the kitchen table:

  Dear Aunt Barbara:

  Thank you for your good advice. What I remember of what you said should have been said to me a long time ago. I helped myself to last night’s coffee and three of your aspirin. I’ll see you soon.

  With love,

  Freddie

  ELOISE WAS KINDER THAN BARBARA. She walked over to the aging room at the other end of the winery. Freddie’s office was in the old building, which was joined to the new, larger building. He had refitted it into a suitable office for himself and for Ms. Gomez, his secretary. Eloise entered his office, came up behind him where he sat at his desk, and kissed the top of his head.

  “Mother,” he said. “No one else kisses me on the top of my head.” He stood up to face her, wincing.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “I have a frightful headache.”

  “I suppose so. You know, Adam was going to talk to you. I said I would.”

  Sensing what was coming, Freddie said, “Adam is a Puritan. All the world can’t behave like Adam.”

  “Adam is a good, loving man. He considers you to be his son. Fran Johnson—well, I called her about the wedding flowers, and—”

  “Go on, Mother.”

  “And she told me”—it was very hard for Eloise—”she told me that you were at the Fairmont the other night with a black prostitute and that you made a scene.” Eloise shook her head and blinked away tears.

  “She’s a foul-mouthed bitch!” Freddie exclaimed. “Yes, I was at the Fairmont—with a wonderful woman. Yes, a black woman—who is as far from a prostitute as you can get. She has a master’s in business administration, and she works as an advertising model in commercials and in stills. She is one of the most successful and sought-after models in California. I did not make a scene. She left the table and walked out because I said something stupid to her and hurt her feelings. That’s all it was. I was a bit under—too much wine. It was not a scene.”

  “I’m sorry, Freddie.” She dropped into a chair. “Give me a tissue, Freddie.” She wiped her eyes, and he bent over to kiss her. “I’ll explain to Adam, and there’ll be no more said about this.” Then she paused and said very tentatively, “Do you like this woman, Freddie?”

  “Precious lot of good if I do. She won’t forgive me.”

  “Women do forgive, Freddie. Otherwise our lives would be impossible.”

  BARBARA TELEPHONED BIRDIE MACGELSIE. Barbara had never asked Birdie, or for that matter anyone else, what his or her religion was, but Birdie had organized at least half of the protests, marches, and sit-ins in San Francisco over the past twenty years, and Barbara recalled her once saying something about the Unitarians. They had been organizing a delegation to the United Nations—one that Barbara missed, being at that time in El Salvador—and now she decided that it was worth a call.

  Birdie, a large, good-natured woman, congratulated Barbara on the way she handled the theft. “What a gesture!” she exclaimed. “I meant to call you.”

  “Birdie, let me ask you a curious and personal question…”

  “Wow! I’m as old as you are, so I’m not pregnant. Angus has taken to sleeping in the guest room, thank God. What else is there?”

  “Are you a Unitarian?”

  “Well, that does it. I would never have thought of that.”

  “Are you?”

  “Sometimes. Maybe one Sunday in three or four or five. Angus is a totally fallen Catholic. I’m sort of—well, it’s hard to describe. Why this curious and personal question?”

  “Phil Carter is taking me to dinner tonight. I need some background.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, God’s truth.”

  “Thank goodness. Do you know how long we’ve been trying to find you someone? How did this happen?”

  “I came in out of the rain one Sunday,” Barbara said. “How old is he?”

  “What an expression of faith! You came in out of the rain. He’s somewhere in his seventies—seventy-three or seventy-four. Madly in love with a wife who died—I think five years ago.”

  “Well, don’t jump to any conclusions.”

  “I’m way ahead of you. You need someone, Barbara. You can’t go on living alone in that house.”

  “Stop right there,” Barbara said. “Thank you for the information, Birdie.”

  “Stay in touch, Barbara,”

  “One more thing,” Barbara insisted. “You intimated that I am the first in his long vigil of mourning?”

  “As far as I know.”

  Barbara said good-bye and felt abashed that she had derided his letter. Birdie was right in her declaration that Barbara needed someone. She had never before lived any length of time without a man in her life, but her instincts shied away from a minister. As far as she was concerned, a person’s life should be involved with facts, and facts were of material substance and not of dreams; when one set about to dream, the facts had to be rejected or destroyed. She remembered only too well the first time she came face-to-face with what she regarded as the plain facts of life. That was in 1934, during the great longshoremen’s strike on the docks of San Francisco, when she had become emotionally involved with the strikers’ need for food. She had worked in a food kitchen then, and her experience there had been the pivotal turning point of her life. Yet she had to admit to herself that when she and Birdie MacGelsie and a few other women had organized Mothers for Peace during the Vietnam War, the first man to join them was Father Matthew Gibbon, a Jesuit priest, and after him a dozen other clerics. Who else had there been to turn to then? The thought hammered at her mind. She was too easily given to cynicism, which she was well aware of, and when she fell into that trap she disliked herself. She had not lived a cynical life; every step she had taken was out of simple belief in the rightness of a cause. But, Barbara, she thought, how many men have asked you to dinner since Carson died? She had not fallen into a morass of mourning; she had gone on with her life—but it was a lonely life. At first, every one of her friends had been eager to invite her to dinner, but she had tired of being the lone woman out. Single men of her age were hard to find, and the dinner invitations became fewer. There were days that stretched on endlessly. She walked alone on the Embarcadero; she once took to needlework, and after a day of earnestly t
rying, she cast it aside in disgust. There was once an entire week when she could not approach her typewriter. Why was she writing a book? There were enough books in the world, and how many women of seventy wrote books? The more she tried to re-create the beginnings of her family, the more she became overwhelmed by the toll that time had taken on them.

  Finally she put all thought of the past aside and dressed herself for the evening date. She chose loose brown slacks, a pullover, and a beige cardigan. It was one of those cool summer days, and by nightfall there would be a cold wind from the Pacific. She tied up her hair and then shook her head with annoyance, untied her hair, combed it out again, and let it fall into a cowlick, shoulder length.

  I always used to wear it that way—explaining to herself. And then, at precisely seven o’clock, the doorbell sounded. It occurred to her that if he had come five minutes early, he would probably have waited outside until seven.

  She opened the door for him, and he greeted her with a shy, self-effacing smile, someone quite different from the confident man who had spoken with her at the church. “I’m very happy to see you,” he said. “I felt my letter was a bit foolish. Old-fashioned.”

  “I like old-fashioned things,” Barbara replied. “When one gets to my age, one is old-fashioned.” Small lies, and why not? “Come in.”

  He wore gray flannels, a white shirt, a bow tie, and a blue blazer. His shoes were old and comfortable. “You’re not ready?” he asked.

  “I’m ready enough. I thought we might have a glass of wine and talk a bit—get to know each other a little as people, rather than as a confused parishioner and her adviser.” She was trying desperately to put him at his ease.

  “Well—” He paused. “I try not to think of myself as an adviser. I mean—well, I’m as confused as the next person.”

  “Will you have some wine? I don’t have any hard liquor.”

  “Sure, that will be fine.”

  “I have white in the fridge. I can open a bottle of red if you prefer.”

  “Oh no. White will be fine.”

  While she went for the wine, he looked around the modest living room: a grospoint rug on the floor, two armchairs and a couch upholstered in bright printed cloth, a very small upright piano, a Victorian chair tufted in black horsehair, and an old leather chair in the last stage of survival. On the wall, an oil painting of a handsome woman who he guessed was her mother, some prints, and a watercolor of a freighter.

  Barbara returned and handed him his glass. “What shall we drink to, Mr. Carter?”

  “Philip, please.”

  “Very well, Philip.”

  “Our meeting, perhaps?”

  “Why not?” Barbara said. “May it be a good meeting.”

  “I feel that I should tell you about myself.” He looked at her inquiringly, as if he expected approval or rejection. “I mean—well, people do know a lot about you—I mean, I’ve read a couple of your books. The one about prison and what it means—that moved me a great deal—and of course your book about El Salvador. I think it was the best book about the horror that we inflicted on that poor, suffering country.”

  “Oh no—no.” Barbara shook her head. “There are better books, believe me.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” he said. “Now, where shall we have dinner?”

  “You leave it up to me?”

  “Yes. You know such things better than I.”

  “Then we’ll go to John’s Place, down on the Wharf, because I’m dying to have some fish and chips and crabmeat and beer. Do you like that kind of thing?”

  “Very much.”

  “And we can walk there, and you can tell me more about yourself on the way.”

  “You’re sure? I thought you might want to go to some—well, more elegant place.”

  “Not a bit. I was hoping you’d agree.”

  “And you want to walk?”

  “Certainly,” Barbara said. “That’s why I dressed the way I did. Flat heels.”

  The sun was beginning to set over the Golden Gate as they started down the hill. “Downhill is worst,” Barbara observed. “It seemed I could fly down the hill when I was a kid. Now I realize that I have knees.”

  He smiled. “I know about knees—knees and hips.”

  “We won’t talk about that. We’re on a date—my first in heaven knows how many years.”

  “My first ever, I suppose, and that’s odd, isn’t it?” He was talking more easily now. After all, he was a man who preached sermons. “I never had what you would call a date with Agatha. She was a nun and I was a priest. We worked together, and one day she said to me, ‘I think I’m in love with you,’ and that’s a frightening thing for a nun to say.”

  “I suppose so. I never thought much about nuns”—reflecting that nunhood was the last thing she would ever try to unravel. She loved men too well. Holding his arm now, feeling the pressure of it against her breast, she realized how much she had missed this, the hard feel of a man’s muscle, the strength of his body. She stumbled once and he steadied her.

  They talked about the City and its hills. He had been born in Kansas, one of eight children, the youngest. Most of the others had died. “I am by eight years the youngest,” he explained, “a great surprise to my mother, a gift from God, as she put it. I never quite understood that, but I accepted it. I was too young to dispute her or anyone about gifts from God. I was educated by the Jesuits from the word go, and I never dreamed that there could be any other future for me. But when they sent me here—well, I knew I was home.”

  “People feel that, way,” she agreed. She could not imagine living anywhere else. “They sent me east to a college called Sarah Lawrence. We had family in Boston. My grandmother was from Boston, and this was always an uncouth frontier town to her. I was sent east to learn the manners of civilization. My grandfather Seldon came around the Horn in one of those square-rigged three-masters, like the Balclutha—the old museum ship—and being a hard-nosed Yankee, he started a bank with the money he inherited from his father.”

  How long it was since she had spoken about this to anyone! Suddenly the memories came floating back. Her father, Dan Lavette, was born in a boxcar full of Italian and Irish laborers sent west to build the Atchison spur line into San Francisco. No inheritance there.

  Philip told her how he had worked as a carpenter after he left the Church, how much he and Agatha had wanted children, and how each time she had become pregnant, she lost the child.

  Their verbal intimacy was explosive, bottled up for silent years, and now suddenly pouring out to each other.

  They sat at a bare wooden table at John’s Place and ate fresh crab and deep-fried fish and fried potatoes and drank beer, and Barbara, eating with a fine mixture of pleasure and guilt, quoted, “‘When all the rules of sloth and greed go down before the gut…’” And the hell with it, she thought. I am actually enjoying myself. I’m pigging out, and thank God I don’t gain weight.

  “And now you’re a Unitarian pastor,” Barbara said, leading to a question she had been storing up. “How? Or have I no right to ask you that?”

  “It came about. I learned to meditate, simple Zen meditation, when I was a Jesuit. I had a good teacher, and that’s the great contradiction in the practice—that is, for a Catholic. The Vatican doesn’t look kindly on meditation. God becomes ineffable, but both Agatha and I needed a church. You can take a Catholic out of the Church, but how can you take the Church out of a Catholic? I worked four years as a carpenter, first as an apprentice and then as a union man, basic stuff, building tract houses. I’m good with my hands, and my father taught me the art as a kid. Agatha worked on and off as a temporary, typing and office work. I got the job through Angus MacGelsie, a builder who was a member of our church. His wife, Birdie, is a Unitarian, and through her, we came to the Unitarian Society. Well, the rest followed. I had the theological background, and I took some courses, and when the minister left, they offered me the job. We’re not a big order—only one church in town.”


  “It’s a small world,” Barbara said. “I’m glad we did this tonight. My first reaction to your letter was to say no. I couldn’t face the thought of a date with anyone. Now…”

  He smiled. “And now?”

  “It’s been a good evening.”

  “Perhaps we can do it again?”

  “Perhaps.”

  THE GUESTHOUSE AT HlGHGATE, to which Harry Lefkowitz and May Ling had returned to spend the night, was a small stone building, once a horse barn just large enough to hold two teams, and converted by Freddie into a pleasant home for himself and May Ling. When their child was born, a son whom they named Daniel, Freddie moved out. When May Ling took over her mother’s job as Joseph Lavette’s assistant at the Napa office, she took herself and her child to Sally’s home in Napa. It was said that the local Napa paper had a chart pinned up with the various Lavettes and Levys, who could always be counted on for good copy; and Barbara, now the senior member of the family, had promised herself that one day she would check out this rumor, as a bit of color for her Lavette—Levy history.

  Not today; today Sally had pleaded with her to come for lunch and to go over the list of wedding guests, and Barbara would have to be back in San Francisco by six, to address the Democratic Women’s Club. Sally was more like a sister than a sister-in-law, turning to Barbara with almost every problem that confronted her. When Barbara entered the house Sally was in a royal rage, shouting into the phone and then slamming it down. May Ling came in from the surgery and said, “Mother, there are patients inside. For God’s sake.” She saw Barbara and embraced her, and then vanished back into the waiting room.

  With a perfunctory kiss on Barbara’s cheek, Sally snorted. “That bastard! No time to talk to Sally Lavette. If I were Charlton Heston or Frank Sinatra, he’d slobber all over me!”

  “Who, Sally? Who were you talking to?”

  “Your president and mine, Mr. Reagan. When I met him at the studio, he did slobber all over me… You’re so lovely, Ms. Lavette. Did you hear what happened?” she asked Barbara.

  “To the president?”

  “No, no. I mean at San Ysidro—just an hour ago. I heard it on the radio. Some lunatic, loaded with rapid-fire weapons, walked into the local McDonald’s and killed twenty people and wounded sixteen others, and it’s just the worst massacre of its kind that ever took place—can you imagine, thirty-six people shot down by one man. And I thought that if I called Reagan—my goodness, I had dinner with him, I know the man—he could go on the air and make this the end of those awful weapons. Barbara, do you know how many gunshot wounds Joe and I treated when he had his office in the barrio? Do you know what one of those weapons does at close range?” She embraced Barbara. “Oh, God, Barbara—what is happening to us? What is the world coming to?”